Still, I can do something. He calls me wanton. He shall know what wanton is.
She smiled as she pinned the last of the sheet onto the hawthorn, scarcely feeling the prickle of the thorns, she was so deep in thought and planning.
Chapter 5
The following day, the theme of the tournament had changed. Damsels were to wear white and the knights black. Sir Tancred had hurried to her tent before dawn, noisy as a blackbird with the news.
"It is to be a procession of Day and Night, the ladies the day..."
And one has his black armour already, for night.
"...We are to ride in company to the wayside spring of a saint, Saint Loye or Saint Frideswide, I forget which, and the damsels will dip their favours in the sacred waters."
Edith quelled a churning rush of panic: she could not ride, not as a lady would. "May I ride with you, Sir Tancred?"
"Princess! It will be an honour!" His face shone in anticipation. "It will be splendid!"
Edith smiled and agreed that it was indeed splendid, while she uttered her genuine thanks and wondered if they would pass any villages. If they did, would the people there be hale and fed? Her eyes strayed through the open tent flap to the present combat field and that host of tall grass and growing wheat. It was surely wrong to allow that to rot, when there were men enough to harvest, at least the hay. The wheat would not be ready yet.
Concern for the crops? But you have left that life behind.
"Peace, my brother," Edith thought in answer in her head, but the waste irked her.
"Do the damsels set tasks for the knights today?" she asked Sir Tancred. This had been a feature of Lady Blanche's tournament so far and she was eager to give Ranulf of Fredenwyke a very particular task, one he would no doubt refuse. She still ached to see his expression when she proposed it.
"That is for tomorrow, after a morning game of hoodman blind."
"I see." Edith itched to say that in her village, a game where one person's hood was turned so that the 'face' of the hood was to the back of the head and the person, blind-folded, was urged to give chase, was considered fit for children. She recalled that as a princess of Cathay she should not know it. "What is hoodman blind, Sir Tancred?"
Her thoughts drifted as her companion eagerly explained. She would not be taking part in hoodman blind: if caught she would be too easily recognized, or worse, unveiled.
I do not miss a child's game, she told herself, wondering even so how it would be to be caught by the black knight himself. He would be gentle, skimming his long fingers lightly across her shoulders, and then her face. When he knew her—as he must at once when he felt the veil—would he wind an arm about her bare middle and scoop her closer to him? Would he thrust her away? Or would he kiss her?
Edith felt her breath stop and her fingers tremble. Such thoughts were idle folly and she was startled by her own soft-heartedness. It must be lust. You have been too long without a mate. Consider your own pale costume: you must be the most splendid and shocking of the damsels.
Ranulf spurred his black palfrey to ride alongside Sir Tancred and his pillion, smirking as the princess unpinned yet another scrap from her costume to hand across to another ever-gracious knight.
"Well met, Sir Dew, Lady Jade," he said, noting the shield of the latest who had received the saucy wench's favour: this time a blue heron on a gold background. So far he had counted five favours granted and five warriors he would fight: he meant to best them all and take nothing from them but those irritating bits of silk. Then we shall see if men are quite so eager to ask for them, eh?
"We are night and day today." Sir Tancred shook his own black cloak and jutted his beard. "You will fight in your own armour?"
"I do. My squire and my page await me at the tourney ground, when we return from the sacred spring." Ranulf watched the small, pale figure riding behind Sir Tancred as he said "page," but the hardened princess did not flinch. "Lady Day." He stood on his stirrups and bowed, hearing the larks in the fields close by and the heady buzz of the damsels' chatter.
"Lord Night."
She stared off into the distance, so far as he could tell. He guided his palfrey closer still, catching a whiff of her perfume.
Her costume, the lack of it, was astonishing. Her head and hair were covered and veiled but as for the rest of her...
He whistled softly, turning the sound quickly into a tune so she would not realize he was disconcerted and yes, frankly impressed.
Truly she was as opulent, as translucent, as fragrant as a lily. Today he and others could see her long, shapely legs, glimpsed through a series of light-as-air skirts that seemed both white and colourless. He had been ready for her naked waist and belly but the tiny, tight-fitting sleeveless jerkin clung to her breasts like moon-light. He found himself imagining if her nipples were pink or dark and cursed himself for being so easily ensnared.
Her feet, brushing Sir Tancred's meaty calves, were narrow, high-arched, and bare.
He decided it was safe and indeed very pleasing to stare at her dainty little feet. "You do not feel the cold, Lady Day? I have heard the land of Cathay is far warmer than England; some would say as hot as hell."
Sir Tancred snorted and his horse danced beneath the pair as he must have tightened his grip on the bridle, but "Lady Day" sighed like a moth moving round a candle and finally fixed her bright eyes on him.
“I never feel the cold, Lord Night. What do you call those blue flowers in the road?”
“Speedwell, my lady,” several young squires replied, all at once, but Ranulf smiled at her obvious ploy. He decided to test her some more.
"I was at a joust once where the ladies gave so much of their sleeves and veils, chemises and mantles, to their jousting knights that they were all but naked by the end of the tournament."
"Strange, Lord Night. I was told that such a fable was from the romance of Perceforest." She smiled, or at least above the white veil pinned across the lower half of her face her eyes crinkled.
"I have heard the romance, too, but this time I saw it," Ranulf went on, determined to have his point. "But you, I note, are already in that state. What will you do, if a knight at the lists asks you for a favour?"
"Are you asking me, Lord Night?"
He admired her courage in tilting straight at the heart of the matter. For that reason he chose not to shame her. "Indeed I am, my lady."
Her dark brows drew close in a frown: clearly she had not expected that answer.
"Nay, I see you puzzled, but do not trouble so, princess. I will find a way. I do not think you can lose any more cloth." He grinned and spurred on, cantering to greet Lady Blanche and Giles, who were already kneeling at the spring.
Chapter 6
Teodwin scratched his newly trimmed beard and checked that the points of his new shoes were shining. From being the smelliest, most grubby pig-man in Warren Hamlet he had become the cleanest and most elegant of Edith's courtiers.
"Sir Giles is here at the joust," he now warned.
"I know." Part of her dreaded any long meeting they might have, although her former master had strutted past his other villagers without any recognition on his part. "But he seems much taken up with the heiress Maud and is easily avoided."
She inhaled slightly, scenting a new savour through the ever-present sweetness of lilies. "What is being cooked?"
"It is already roasted and presented—a gift of rabbit from Sir Henry. I have already sent him your thanks."
Edith nodded, grateful that Teodwin had understood she was less keen to see the knight since the accusation of Sir Henry being a brute had emerged. But then, who was she to judge? And why should she trust anything Ranulf said?
Almost as if he sensed her thought, Teodwin added, "Sir Ranulf is coming now to our tent to return the favours you gave to the others. It is rumoured he will do so for no price, save for a kind word from you."
"You admire him, Teodwin?"
"He has great prowess in arms. He won a dozen favours. The
castle is alive with the news: a great crowd of damsels have come with him—which is why he is not here yet, for he must stroll at their pace."
"For which mercy I suppose I must be grateful." Edith pressed at her temples with her fingers. Enduring the black knight's endless parade of victories over "her" knights and having returned early from the jousting ground, claiming a headache, she wished she had one in earnest.
"He strikes at my mystery." The wretched man had beaten those who had received her favour: until he came to this tourney her favour had been seen as a sure sign of success, for those who carried it had always won.
Until he came....
"Damn him! He makes us all unsafe!"
"Turn it about, then." Showing his faith in her, Teodwin wrinkled one of his rare grins, reminding Edith briefly and poignantly of Adam. "You have before."
"Must I see him?"
Teodwin ignored her plaintive question and also her narrowed eyes—as he was fond of telling her, he was not one of her besotted knights.
"I think this one is dangerous, Edith. He asks too many questions. Three times I have found him ready to talk to one of the others."
Edith sighed and nodded, rubbing harder at her head. She knew that the other villagers were vulnerable; few could remember the stories of Cathay that she had tried, night after night, to persuade them to remember.
"I have told them to feign a lack of understanding," Teodwin went on, "but you know how Walter and Maria love to chatter."
"So I must distract him more," Edith replied, with an ease she did not feel.
"He is also asking after a little maid in brown."
"Truly?" Edith, unveiled, widened her eyes and tried to mask her flutter of inner excitement with the most innocent of expressions. "There are many answering that description."
"Yes, but he was sorry when no one knew for sure who he meant." Teodwin limped across the tent—his right leg would never be the same after that beating he had endured from Sir Giles's men—and placed his red, worn hands on her shoulders. "Take care, Edith. That is all I ask. This knight could be a very bad enemy. You would be wise not to provoke him."
His gentleness made her want to howl. "I will beware," she promised. She cocked her head and repinned her veil. "I think I hear them now."
"Why does he come, I wonder? To exult?"
Last year Teodwin would not have known the meaning of the word. Neither had she, but she suspected she would learn the full meaning very soon. "I do not know," she whispered, feeling the blush start deep in her chest and heartily wishing in that moment that she wore a less revealing costume.
Ranulf had his own suspicions concerning the identity of the little brown maid, but when he and the damsels—who had clung close to him, like butterflies on a nettle bush—halted outside the Lady of Lilies’ multi-coloured, splendid tent, his common sense bawled that his instincts were wrong.
Putting that exasperating mystery aside, he addressed the stocky, haughty steward of the princess, the bandy-legged fellow in the bright silk coat who limped everywhere with a carved walking stick.
"Please inform your mistress I am here and would be admitted into her tent."
"Her court, good sir," corrected the steward, in a sing-song, clicking voice that set Ranulf's teeth on edge.
"As you will." Hungry and pleasantly aching after a day on the tourney field and half-thinking of his supper, he waved the man off and was surprised when the older man stood his ground. "What now?"
The steward's mottled cheeks became as gaudy as his mantle.
"My princess will see no man without her chaperone Sir Tancred being present."
"Will no other suffice?" Ranulf countered, adding, "I have bathed and shaved."
Why admit that? he stormed against himself, as the young womenfolk with him tittered. With any other damsel, princess or no, he would be in her chamber by now, and Lucifer take the consequences. But then, since Olwen, he had not bowed or scraped to any woman. He glanced at his ungloved hands, missing the pearl that had been his wife's. Why am I doing so now?
The steward was not impressed by his confession. "Have you a message for the princess?"
Ranulf made his choice. "It, and her favours, will keep for the morrow."
He turned, extending his arms to two delighted damsels, and strolled with them back down to the field.
"Tomorrow he will be less proud," raged Edith. She had seen and heard the whole and was determined this brute tower of a knight would not best her. She paced the tent, slapping her hands together in sheer frustration. "He keeps my favours!"
"Enough of that, Edith," said Teodwin. "I saved you today, so do not antagonize him tomorrow. Let him have those scraps, if it please him."
"Tomorrow will be better," Edith vowed. Tomorrow I will have planned and he shall fall. Oh how, he shall fall, like Lucifer!
The following day, she gave out no favours. "I would have no man the target of black malice," she remarked, when a young squire asked plaintively after one. She knew the word would go back to Ranulf and smiled to herself as she dressed with care.
True to her word she did not take part in the games of hoodman blind but ensured she appeared at the noon-day table where Lady Blanche, her husband, Lord Richard, and the ladies of the castle "court" were taking a light meal out of doors before the afternoon trials and jousts would begin. The knights were there, too, fussing with their hawks, roughing with their hounds, or merely sitting on the dry grass before Lady Blanche's table, being served white bread and soft cheese and wine by scampering maids and pages. As she bowed to the lady, Edith sensed a pair of intent dark brown eyes boring into her back. Had the black knight a hawk or dog? She did not know that yet. She skimmed the mob of knights for Sir Giles but, to her relief, did not see him.
"Princess. As ever it is a delight when you join us." Lady Blanche whispered to a hovering server and a stool was found and brought out to their high table. "Be pleased to sit with me."
Edith settled onto the seat, thanking and greeting those about. It was indeed pleasant to sit under the branches of a spreading oak tree, with swifts and swallows twittering about, and to be given a cup of sweet wine and a trencher of cheese and ginger-bread, served on a well-scrubbed table by smiling, well-fed attendants. As a female minstrel began to beat a tabor and sing of lost love, she thought of Gregory, how he had loved to sing in church. The wine turned sour in her mouth as visions of how he had died thrust themselves into the front of her mind.
"Do you frown, princess? I note you do not eat: is something not to your liking?" Lady Blanche asked, leaning toward her, ahead of her husband.
Edith shook her head. "All is excellent, my lady." She took another sip of wine, wishing she did not have to manage her veil, but then the veil was part of her mystery and she must always wear it. She avoided eating in public because of the veil, and the whole matter of manners: part of her longed to stuff the sweet gingerbread into her mouth and chew with a will, but she knew such an act would be too coarse.
Trying not to frown, she took another sip of wine, and then the older woman gave her the perfect opening. "I understand you have a fierce quest for our doughty knights this afternoon. Do you regret that now?"
Edith could scarcely speak for an instant, disbelieving her own good fortune. Here was a perfect chance for her to torment Ranulf of Fredenwyke under the guise of the courtly game and good manners.
"Not at all, my lady," she replied quickly. "I fear only that it may prove too much."
"That could never be so," called out Sir Tancred, her champion. Sitting on a mound of cast-off cloaks like a young lad, he raised his cup to her and smiled. "You are ever fair, my lady."
"'Tis so, 'tis so," echoed others, keen to ingratiate themselves with the eastern princess. Sitting at the table with her, the other ladies frowned and fanned themselves with their hands while their gimlet eyes pricked her over. She was glad she wore her largest cloak: beneath that her costume was as scandalous as she wished, but that was not for the womenf
olk.
"Still, I would learn more of this quest," drawled a well-known voice. As her adversary spoke, he rose from a patch of tall oxlips, yellow pollen dusting his right ear. Inconsequentially, she wanted to brush it off: her fingers twitched before she knew what she was about. He was dressed in white today, a linen mantle and fine leggings that showed off his tall, sinewy frame and strong tan. Her heart quickened as she stared at him, feeling a second rush of admiration when he smiled, showing those perfect teeth.
"My Lady of Lilies." He swept her a low bow. "Is that your only name?"
For an instant panic surged over her before she told herself it was impossible that he should have discovered her. Clutching her sweating palms together under the table, she replied steadily, "My true name is impossible for the men of the west to speak. I would not shame you, Sir Ranulf, by asking you to attempt it."
"Ever fair," sighed Sir Tancred. For once his fulsome asides irked her a little, though she would not be unkind enough to show it. She winked at the older knight, wishing Ranulf was as easy to please.
“I see you are in white today, Sir Ranulf,” observed Lady Blanche, her long, craggy features glowing, revealing a glimpse of the high-spirited girl she had been.
“A rumour goes round that I am black malice. I would disprove this, my lady.”
“Naturally.”
“But you are not in white,” he went on.
“Today we take fire as our theme,” Lady Blanche replied, lifting her arms to show off her long scarlet sleeves.
“I see the fire of the east is yellow.” Ranulf flicked Edith a wicked look. “Will that be all burned away, later?”
“Perhaps.” Edith pulled her yellow cloak more snugly across her middle, feeling the delicate cloth pooling about her narrow waist. Let him think what he would: he would change his tune.
"I have a sleeve in mind for you, Sir Ranulf," the Lady Blanche continued, ignoring their banter. "Now that you are no longer in mourning and have taken the favours of our princess."
Love and Chivalry: Four Medieval Historical Romances Page 89